End of Summer Ruminations

The grind toward the election continues. Every poll is useless because nobody knows how many new voters have registered since Roe was overturned.

Dad moves into assisted living in less than two weeks. He will have access to Direct TV. Apparently there is one channel devoted entirely to broadcasting Perry Mason! All day and all night! I mentioned this to Dad and he laughed. He said one episode a day is probably enough.

I checked out an RV the other day. I want to buy one and retrofit it as a mobile writing studio, but the timing isn’t quite right yet.

The book about the homeless in my neighborhood is nearing completion. I fear it won’t have a happy ending.

The sweeps of the homeless camps around Portland are ratcheting up. They help and they don’t help. The journalists who interview residents of these encampments are asking all the wrong questions. They are treating the residents like children. Ask tough questions of everyone involved, including the advocates for the homeless. I would have loved to been a newspaper reporter covering this beat.

I’m not in favor of Biden running for a second term, but I have loved how he got on the offensive the past three or four months and relentlessly attacked. Not enough Democrats do this.

I would rank the Governor of Florida flying legal immigrants seeking political asylum to Martha’s Vineyard on private planes as the most cynical, amoral and obscene political stunts in my political lifetime. How could anyone decent vote for him?

It looks like I’ll be publishing three new books of my writing next year, including my first children’s book.

It is my sincere with that University or Oregon lose as many football games as possible. I detest what they have come to represent in Oregon with their special teams coach making millions of dollars a year and the new charlatan head coach and his blathering bullshit cliches of “explosive plays” and “physicality.”

I watched ten minutes of the new Lord of Rings streaming show and stopped. It recycled so many shots/tropes/images from the original film trilogy that I simply couldn’t watch. It’s a complexity derivative artistic endeavor, just like the Game of Thrones reboot and all the Star Wars spinoffs.

I picked up a volume of Robert Browning’s poetry from a street library as a present for Dad. We perused the poems and he said he was never much of a Browning fan. Too formal, too long winded. Too much iambic pentameter. I read one sonnet, however, called “Memorabilia” that was simply delightful. It’s about a walker with a head full of thoughts who finds an eagle feather and tucks inside his vest and forgets about all those thoughts because the feather was so wonderful.

I never considered something like taking home an eagle feather found on a walk as an act of collecting memorabilia, but it truly is! I do that sort of thing all the time in nature. I once amassed the world’s largest collection of beaverwood! You talk about memorabilia.

The other night I saw a solo country and western guitar player/singer at a wine bar and was shocked to realize how much I enjoyed the experience of seeing live music. I may make it a regular thing. It was free, which was a good thing since a glass of wine cost $12.

It feels strange to think that I don’t have a single idea for a short story. This hasn’t happened in well over 25 years, about the same time I got the writing going. I don’t even have an idea for a Christmas story!

It looks almost pathetic to me to see people wait in line hours and hours to see an old dead woman. America has got a lot going wrong with it, but at least the Founding Fathers didn’t enshrine a monarchy and titles of nobility into the Constitution, although Alexander Hamilton wanted both.